


buachaill sciobail

by silentwalrus



Series: barnacle boy [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Gen, Humor, M/M, Podfic Available, Selkie - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-08 14:56:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13460625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: “Okay,” Sam says. “Okay. Alright. O-kay. I just, I gotta say, man, when you told me ‘Bucky is a selkie’ this is not... really…. what I... imagined.”“What did you imagine?” Steve says. Across his lap - or rather covering his entire body from the waist down - the eight hundred pound tube of blubber that is J.B. Barnes blows a snot bubble.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [buachaill sciobail](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13972218) by [kasmunaut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kasmunaut/pseuds/kasmunaut), [WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party/pseuds/WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party)



“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay. Alright. O-kay. I just, I gotta say, man, when you told me ‘Bucky is a selkie’ this is not... really…. what I... imagined.” 

“What did you imagine?” Steve says. Across his lap - or rather covering his entire body from the waist down - the eight hundred pound tube of blubber that is J.B. Barnes blows a snot bubble. 

“Honestly, I do not know,” Sam says. “But you said it and I looked at the hair and I was like, yeah, okay, sure, whatever.” 

“Why the hair?” Steve says, mystified. He scoops up some more water in his yellow plastic jug and pours it over the span of Barnes’ back that isn’t underwater. The tub is almost full and Steve’s sitting in there up to his chest, but Barnes is the size of a go-kart and practically spherical. Even flattened out and listing to the side a good third of him is poking out of the water. 

“You know,” Sam says, distracted. Barnes chooses that moment to shift and the ripples of fat traveling backwards and forwards over his bulk are mesmerizing. His pelt does, admittedly, look amazingly soft, the fur silvery and going from brown to grey depending on the lighting. “Selkies, long hair, luring sailors into the water, that sort of thing.”

Barnes turns his massive head just enough to fix Sam with one watery eye and gives him as evil a look as it’s possible to get on a face that looks like a waterlogged pug on ecstasy. “That’s sirens,” Steve says, just the faintest hint of reproach in his voice. He scratches Barnes under the chin, which makes everything wobble again. “Selkies are different. There’s no luring of anybody. In fact usually they’re the ones getting lured,” he says darkly.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, still staring in fascination. Barnes’ face looks like a couple of tennis balls encased in gelatin. He looks like a water balloon upholstered in velvet. He tried to keep glaring at Sam but apparently Steve’s scritches are too much to resist and now his eyes have closed into slits that make him resemble a cartoon smiley face. Sam is throttling the urge to poke him and see if he’s really as squishy as he looks.

“Wait,” he says, struggling back to objectivity. “How does this  _ work? _ You were a big dude, yeah, but you weren’t  _ baby whale  _ big.” Sam’s never actually seen a seal up close, but this can’t be right. They can’t all be this size, not unless they’re swimming near radioactive waste outlets. “Where does the extra mass come from? Where does it go?”

“Magic,” Steve says placidly. He’s moved on from scritches and is now rubbing Barnes’ face like he’s a dog.

“Seriously?” Sam says. “That’s what we’re going with?”

“Yup,” Steve says. Barnes makes a noise like a drain unclogging and wobbles from side to side. Steve manages to hide the wince pretty quickly but Sam still derives some satisfaction from confirming that yeah, blubber boy here weighs exactly as much as it looks like. Steve’s knees must be killing him. 

“Wouldn’t this be more comfortable in the ocean?” Sam asks. There’s a distinctly marine smell in the air that indicates the bathtub is full of salt water, currently occupied by salt water  _ creature, _ but it’s still just a tub. It looks like a goddamn fishbowl compared to Barnes, who is wedged in diagonally and still has his head and ass fins resting on the edges on either side. “I’m pretty sure Stark has a private beach somewhere. He’s probably got a damn catalogue you can pick from.”

“We’ll go to the ocean later,” Steve says. “He has to heal up first.”

“Oh,” Sam says. That makes sense. The ocean is full of horrible things with stingers and tentacles and teeth and it’s highly unlikely that supersoldier assassin skills translate to a body that’s ninety-eight percent lard. Sam can’t see any sign of injury, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t internal. “Is he okay? Did you guys go see a… vet?”

“He’s regrowing his arm,” Steve says. 

“What,” Sam says, but now that he moves to look at Barnes’ left side, even submerged he can see that the space where a flipper should be is red and raw-looking. There’s dark grey lines like scars running up that side, over his body, but where the arm was looks disturbingly like an open wound. Sam would make some noises about maybe bandaging that shit, but Barnes is just lying there and Steve seems pretty calm, so maybe it’s not as bad as it looks. 

“I was wondering about that,” Sam says says instead. He knew they were with Stark getting the arm taken off, at some point in the past seventy-two hours between Sam seeing them last and Barnes abandoning bipedalism. “I mean, clearly I don’t know shit about selkies, but I was thinking like, what happens when he… transforms. Like, do we get a tin flipper or -”

“He couldn’t,” Steve says calmly. “Not until we got the arm off.” 

“Right,” Sam says. “So he - wait, did you say he’s  _ regrowing his arm?” _

“It’ll take a few weeks,” Steve says, just as calmly. “And he can’t change back and forth while it’s happening. Stark is having the private pool drained upstairs so we can fill it with salt water.”

“He’s  _ regrowing his arm,” _ Sam says. It feels like his brain is stuck on a boot cycle where there’s too many facts trying to load and he just has to keep skipping between all of them. “Seriously? His  _ entire arm?” _

“I’m not really sure how it works,” Steve admits. “But he said - his skin remembers, apparently. It remembers him whole.”

“How the fuck does that - ” Sam stops and looks at the large, flubbery evidence of a universe that doesn’t give a damn about whether what humans call the laws of physics are right or not. “Okay. Alright. Magic, that’s cool.”

“Very cool,” Steve agrees gravely. Sam realizes the bastard has been laughing at him the whole time, goddamn you mister oh-yeah-I-don’t-have-much-of-a-poker-face. He narrows his eyes. James Buchanan Barnes is the Winter Soldier and coincidentally also a selkie with magic stem cells? Alright, fine. There’s weirder shit in the world. Sam can roll with it. Sam is the king of rolling with it, and more importantly, will not let Steve Rogers win, ever, at anything. 

“Yeah, alright, fuck you too,” Sam tells Steve, who grins at him. “You got your Barnacle Boy boyfriend, I’m happy for you. How are you gonna get him upstairs? One of those SeaWorld slings and an airlift? Is he just gonna hump his way into the elevator?”

“We’ll manage,” Steve says, continuing to look blissfully unconcerned by the physics violation sprawled in all its fishy glory over his kneecaps. 

“I bet,” Sam says. Barnes raises his flippers - his entire ass half, frankly - and slaps them back down against the side of Stark’s giant bathtub. It makes a sound like a bag of cement slammed against a metal gong. “Yeah, yeah, alright,” Steve laughs, leaning to the side to snag the big red bucket balanced on the far edge of the tub. It’s - yup, full to the brim of raw salmon. Sushi-grade, if Sam had to bet on it. Steve picks out a big chunk with his bare hand and holds it to Barnes’ face. Barnes opens his mouth - oh jesus those are  _ teeth - _ and engulfs it with a noise too big to be a slurp. 

“Wow,” Sam says weakly. His resolution to be extremely cool in the face of all supernatural developments wavers in the face of watching Barnes masticate like a living sink disposal. Steve eventually manages to extract his hand, now covered liberally in selkie spit. “So… a couple of weeks, huh?” Sam says. 

Steve glances at him and grins. “You should see him eat crab,” he says. 

“I really think I should not,” Sam says. Barnes burps. A wash of extremely potent fish-breath blows through the bathroom. “I think what I  _ should  _ do is google animal toothbrushes,” he says. 

Barnes opens his mouth and gives a bleat that sounds like the devil trying to fill a balloon using only his asshole, ramped up to a decibel that’s straight up painful in this echo chamber of a bathroom. Sam swears and retreats to the sound of Steve’s laughter, Barnes grunting loudly as he tries to stick his face in the bucket of fish. 

Sam shakes his head, turning the corner and going for the elevator. He’s gonna get his phone, his shoes and his wallet and he is gonna get Steve back for the damn Free Willy Surprise back there. Upstairs swimming pool, huh? If they think Sam’s not gonna bean Barnes with an inflatable tricolor beachball they got another think coming. With the right combination of fish food he might even get Barnes to do tricks. He is going to make a  _ killing _ on YouTube. 


	2. Chapter 2

Barnes does, in fact, hump his way into the elevator. Sam naturally is on hand to film, because watching the walk of something so hilariously not designed for walking is entertainment not to be missed or wasted. Barnes gives him baleful glares in between wobbly, laborious scoots. He’s extra unbalanced due to the lack of arm-fin, which, out of the water, looks even more gruesome and is  _ definitely  _ oozing unspeakable seal fluids. It doesn’t look infected, just raw and gross, so Sam decides this is part of the mystical super-selkie healing process and that he’s only gonna kick up a fuss about medical attention if tomorrow it looks worse. 

“Careful with the phone,” Steve says absently. He’s hovering over Barnes like he’s watching his toddler take his first steps, as if Barnes is in any danger of falling over when he’s already basically flat on his face. “He’ll knock it in the water if he gets annoyed.”

“You throw my phone in the pool, I’m making selkie sashimi,” Sam tells Barnes’ mottled fuzzy ass, but he does stop recording. Tragically, due to things like opsec and common sense and privacy yadda yadda he’s only sending it to his sister anyway. 

Barnes, ignoring them both, maneuvers his way inside the elevator cube like an eighteen-wheeler trying to parallel park on a postage stamp. When he gets himself facing the doors he heaves a sigh and relaxes, somehow tripling in square footage as he puddles out over the entire floor. His bulk slumps against Steve’s shins and engulfs Sam’s shoes entirely, but Sam came prepared for all sorts of horrible liquid eventualities and is wearing his nasty home reno sneakers. 

“The pool is really close to the elevator,” Steve tells the top of Barnes’ head. “We won’t have to go far.” Barnes turns his head just enough to gnaw on Steve’s leg in what Sam can only assume is affection. 

“Maybe you should put him in a wheelbarrow,” Sam suggests. Barnes’ head swings around again, this time with very different intent, but the elevator dings and Sam skips out before Barnes can slime him in revenge. 

The pool really isn’t that far from the elevator, but it takes them five whole minutes to get there. Barnes makes  _ schlop… schuff… schlifff   _ noises as he does the selkie shuffle down the hall, and he only snaps his teeth at Sam once before putting all his focus into The Scoot. “All those poets who called selkies graceful willows were blind and lying morons,” Sam says, from safely out of range. 

Barnes growls but doesn’t stop scooting. Steve gives Sam an amused glance. “You’ve been reading selkie poetry?” 

“Know thy enemy,” Sam says, refusing to be shamed about perfectly reasonable research. 

Barnes makes it to the edge of the pool. He stretches his neck out like a giant blubber slinky, sniffs the water, and makes a sound like a sewage pump clearing a pipe blockage. This is apparently a happy noise, because without further ado he tips himself face first into the water. 

That seems to be that. Steve looks around the room, hands on his hips. “Better start moving in,” he says speculatively. 

“Good luck,” Sam says genuinely, because living in a giant echoing pool room for a month with a roommate that smells like a fishmarket sounds like nothing short of hell. 

Sam means to help, and he does do online furniture shopping with Steve that afternoon, but then a day later Sam’s cousin has her baby, and then the Air Force needs a consult, and between one thing and another it’s a month later before Sam comes back to New York and the tower and Steve’s aquatic love nest with his big watery boo. It’s changed a bit since Sam saw it. There is now a bed in the corner, for one thing, though it looks untouched in favor of a big ceramic heating plate set up on the tiles by the big wall of windows. It’s strewn with towels, empty buckets and Steve, sprawled on his back in the sunshine. 

Sam goes over and pokes him with his foot. “You need to spend time around people who do things besides sleep and eat their bodyweight in mackerel,” Sam says.

Steve opens one eye and wraps an arm around Sam’s calf in greeting. Somebody found him a pair of swim trunks that, amazingly, aren’t printed with the American flag, and right now it’s just that and nothing else. “Hey Sam,” he says, cuddling Sam’s sneaker. 

He  _ definitely  _ needs to get out more. “Where’s your better insulated half?” Sam says. 

Steve points at the pool. Sam catches sight of the blurry shape zooming back and forth underwater. For a creature that moves like an angry slug on land Barnes sure has a turn of speed down there.

Steve sticks his leg in the pool and splashes in Barnes’ general direction. Sam is not setting one single toe in there, because he  _ highly doubts  _ Barnes gets out when it’s time to haul seal ass to the potty. Steve can do what he likes, but there is no force on this earth that will voluntarily make Sam enter a pool that is forty percent selkie pee. 

Barnes bobs to the surface like a Jello submarine. “Say hi to Sam, you bastard,” Steve says, flicking more water at him. 

Barnes honks and dives back under the water. Steve shakes his head disapprovingly at the ripples. That’s a slight departure from his usual behavior, namely looking at Barnes like he personally hung the moon. “You guys have a fight over who gets to put their ass on the hot rock or something?” Sam says.

“No,” Steve says. “He’s just refusing to change.” 

“What, back into a human?” Sam says. 

Exactly back into a human, apparently. “Is he stuck?” Sam demands. 

“No, he just doesn’t want to,” Steve says. 

“Why not?”

“Every time I ask he just splashes me and then eats another fish.”

Sam looks around the room, but nothing amazingly tantalizing has appeared in the last five minutes to justify staying in here more than twenty-four hours. “Is the pool just that good? What do you guys even do in here?”

“Read, mostly,” Steve says. “Bucky pretty much just eats.”

Sam looks at Steve. “When’s the last time you went outside?” 

Steve blinks. “I go for a run every morning. Well. Most mornings.”

“Right,” Sam says. “Come on. We’re booting Barnes’ ass outta there. How do we get him to change?”

Steve, after deliberation, decides that the way to go is to tempt Barnes with human amenities. “It’s better if he changes because he wants to,” he says. “I don’t want to push him. Much.”

When Sam returns from putting his phone in the guest room where it’ll be one hundred percent out of any splash zone, Steve is sitting by the poolside, holding up a pair of slim-fit charcoal slacks. He waves them at Barnes, who is floating a couple of yards away with a distinctly unimpressed look. “Look at this nice pair of pants,” Steve says coaxingly. “Don’t you miss pants? I know you miss fancy ties.” 

Barnes yawns, showing off approximately ten million teeth in a horrible pink maw the size of a ten-year-old’s torso. Sam looks at Steve. “Seriously?”

Steve looks up at him. “Bucky likes fashion,” he says. 

“You’re trying to lure him back to humanity with  _ pants,” _ Sam reiterates, just in case hearing the thought process out loud makes Steve realize what the hell kind of plan that is. 

“Bucky always liked human stuff,” Steve says, putting the pants down. He picks up a plain white button down from the plastic bag at his side. “Look at this, Buck. Isn’t it nice?”

Maybe exposure to fish fumes has rotted Steve’s brain. “If I never had to wear pants again I’m not sure I would miss them,” Sam says. “I know I don’t miss  _ ties. _ Whose stuff even is that?”

“I dunno. I asked an intern and this is what she brought,” Steve says. 

“Did she ask why Captain America is just hanging out in Stark’s pool with a mammal that looks like a furry trash bag?”

“No,” Steve says. Barnes gives Sam a frosty look and sinks back under the water. “She was really polite.” A moment later Barnes reappears again, flopping out of the pool to land on the ceramic rock. He puts his head down, rolls back and forth a little and then to all appearances goes to sleep. 

“Well, it didn’t work,” Sam says, waving at the roly poly ignoring the hell out of them across the room. “What now?”

The door behind them opens, letting in Tony Stark, in a hideously stained t-shirt and jeans and a welder’s mask pushed up over almost comically greasy hair. He’s holding the biggest donut Sam has ever seen, which would be even bigger if Stark wasn’t currently halfway through eating it. “What the hell are you doing down here, Rogers? Why do I have an intern telling me Captain America is pantsless on the fifty-third floor?” 

Steve looks down, then back up. “I’m wearing pants,” he says, despite his obvious no shirt no shoes no social skills dress code. 

“He needed the pants for his boyfriend,” Sam says wearily. He definitely needs to take Steve out for walkies if this is what his reactions have been reduced to. 

“What the hell for? He doesn’t have legs,” Stark says, coming over to them and taking another chomp of donut. “You want to stick him in pants anyway, fine, some people put their poodles in outfits, but you’re not gonna get anywhere with  _ that  _ waistline.”

“We’re trying to get him to change back into a human,” Sam says. “Got any ideas?” 

Stark looks at Steve, who nods, then at Sam, who shrugs. “Seriously?”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Sam says. “Steve’s my horse in this race.”

Stark stares at the rotund shape snoozing on the heated rock. He’s quiet for a long moment, chewing. “You can’t eat donuts if you’re a seal,” he says finally. 

“That’s what you’ve got?” Sam says. Across the room, Barnes rolls into the water like a rock falling off a cliff, without any visible change in wakefulness. 

Stark gestures avidly with his donut. “What, sitting on your ass, getting fed, not a care in the world? Why the hell would he change back? Why are you even trying to make him?” 

“He needs to get his arm checked out,” Steve says, reanimating a little. “And it’s a lot easier to find a doctor than a marine biologist with medical expertise.” 

“So he doesn’t wanna go to the vet,” Stark concludes. “Well, fine. Tell Seamore over there if he doesn’t want to deal with his own doctor’s appointments we’ll set them up for him, and it’ll be with a cattle doctor who’ll take  _ any  _ reason to use a speculum -”

Barnes explodes out of the water like Mt. Vesuvius erupting over Pompeii. Stark screams. For a moment the entirety of Barnes’ body is out of the water, a bag of blubber tipped with teeth. Then he crashes back down with a sonic boom of a splash, spraying water so hard it hits the walls. Steve and Sam are left spitting, hands thrown up against the spray. Stark is left soaked, sputtering and empty handed as Barnes proves that you can, in fact, eat donuts if you’re a seal. 

“If he hadn’t donated his arm to science,” Stark says, after a busy, dripping silence, “your lease would  _ so  _ be up right now.” 

“Sorry about that,” Steve says, looking only about thirty percent as apologetic as he sounds. “His impulse control is terrible when he has flippers.” 

Stark flips his welding visor down, pointing a finger at both of them as he walks backwards towards the door. “Sort this shit out,” he says.

Sam looks at Steve. Steve squeegees some water off his face. “Maybe you should just let him change back in his own time,” Sam suggests. 

Steve considers this. He looks over at the pool, where on cue Barnes bobs up like a cork. He blinks at them before creasing his face in that cartoon smile again. It looks distinctly evil this time. 

Steve narrows his eyes. “No,” he says. 

“Right,” Sam says. “How do we do this?” 

They escalate the plan of attack. Since taking an adversarial approach might prove… wet, they decide to continue with temptation. Steve brings in a record player and Sam brings a boombox and they play music for Barnes, bringing the hits of their respective generations to the table. While Barnes does make them replay  _ Hot Stuff  _ thirteen times by closing his jaws around Sam’s leg until he hits the replay button, he does not change back into a human. 

They try food next. They eat burgers in front of Barnes, making exaggerated appreciative noises and licking their fingers after the fries. This one hundred percent backfires, because Barnes just wiggles up close to them and puts his head on Steve’s knee, turning enormous liquid eyes up to him in pure supplication. Steve gives like a wet paper towel and feeds him two burgers and three cartons of fries before Sam even knows what happened. “Hey!” Sam says, outraged, but Barnes just lurches up with surprising speed, darts his head forward to grab Sam’s burger out of his hand and wheels backwards into the water. 

Stark eventually gets them back by playing seal mating calls at random hours. It takes a while for Sam to realize that’s what they are, because he’s not in there all the time and it just sounds like somebody calibrating a foghorn. “I thought this was the seal version of like, Enya,” he says, when Steve complains, and then he has to explain what Enya is, and then apparently Steve gets Stark back by convincing the building AI to only play Enya whenever Stark wants to hear music. Sam wants to hear the whole story, obviously, except he also really doesn’t, because then he might have to find out what  _ Barnes’ _ reaction to hearing a seal mating call was. He literally never wants to think the concepts of “seal” and “mating” and “Barnes” in the same thought.

Naturally the universe denies him. The very next day Steve resorts to extreme pressure tactics. He beckons Barnes out of the water, takes his rubbery face in both hands, and leans down to look him close in the eyes. “I can’t have sex with you if you’re a seal,” he says seriously. 

Sam has to witness Barnes  _ visibly doubt it.  _ Sam believes him. If anyone knows what kind of freaky depraved shit Steve would stoop to, it’s Barnes. Sam is lost in the horror of Steve harboring a very real chance of zoophilia when Barnes heaves a huge sigh, his nostrils flaring, and sinks down in Steve’s hands, eyes closing in defeat. 

For a second Sam thinks that’s it, the call of Steve’s dick is greater than that of the aquatic lifestyle. Then Barnes opens his eyes, licks Steve’s face, and halumphs back into the water. 

Steve doesn’t look all that put out about the fact that his significant other just cast aspersions as to the nature of his sexual proclivities and then chose pinnipedality over his dick. He puts his hands to his mouth and calls, “You can’t jack off if you’re a seal, either!” 

Barnes swings his head back to look at them. “Oh jesus,” Sam says, and beats feet out of there before Barnes can try to prove Steve wrong. 

“We have to escalate,” Sam tells Steve later, after he’s judged sufficient time has passed for Barnes to work out his aggressions on Steve for the jacking off comment. “What does he want that he can’t get as a seal?”

Steve looks over at Barnes. Barnes sneezes, which makes him rotate gently in the water. It’s actually pretty cute, and not only because it’s just a little  _ achoo  _ and most of his other noises sound like God farting into a busted trumpet. “If you don’t change,” Steve tries, “We can’t go to the ocean. We can’t just take you through the streets.” 

Barnes gives Steve a look that says he knows perfectly well if push comes to shove Steve will wrap him in a bedsheet and personally haul him across Manhattan to the nearest bit of salt water. Steve shrugs and gives Sam a look that says, well, shit, homeboy’s got my number. What am I supposed to do?

Given this state of affairs, Sam has to deploy his own plan, which is annoying Barnes back onto two legs. It has the benefit of being his original reaction upon finding out the dude is a selkie, which Sam is going to take extra pleasure in now that Barnes has stolen his burger. He doesn’t care if he gets splashed with nasty pee water anymore. He arms himself with a dollar store beachball, sends Steve outside the tower for coffee and strides into the pool room.

Barnes is already bobbing at the surface when he comes in. “Hey butterball,” Sam calls. “If you wanna spend the rest of your life as a glorified sea cow you be my guest, but I’m gonna be dragging Steve out of here way more often from now on. He needs socialization and environmental enrichment. You do too, I bet,” he says, and tosses the beachball into the pool. “There you go. You stay in there, that’s what you got to look forward to. Rubber chew toys and recycled pool water.”

Barnes gives him a long, thoughtful look. Without breaking eye contact, he drops his jaw, delicately arranges his mouth around the ball and bites down. It punctures instantly with a sad little squeak. 

“You don’t scare me,” Sam says, over the pathetic hiss of air leaving the hapless beachball. “I’ve got opposable thumbs. And a brachiated walking pattern, which means you couldn’t catch me if you -  _ hoshit!” _

Barnes lunges out of the pool and hits the ground already humping, somehow gaining speed despite the fact that he doesn’t have anything to gain speed  _ with.  _ Sam, discovering that The Scoot is actually terrifying when it’s pointed at you and  _ still accelerating,  _ deploys evasive maneuvers immediately. 

Sam is not one to admit defeat and neither is Steve, but in the face of overwhelming opposition they are forced to confront the fact that their plans are not coming to fruition. The next day Sam joins Steve by the pool where he’s tossing anchovies at Barnes, who happily snaps them out of the air with a sound like a spoonful of mashed potatoes repeatedly getting flung at the wall. 

Sam watches the scene with dead eyes. He knows he’ll have limited success in making good on his threat to separate Barnes from Steve, because Steve is sadness married to the guy on top of being regular old married. He might be stuck visiting this goddamn zoo forever, just to see Steve and the ever-growing buildup of salt in his hair.  _ “Can  _ he transform?” Sam says dully. “Are you sure that’s Barnes and not just… like…. a seal?” 

Steve slowly turns his head to stare at him. “Yes,” he says. 

Sam watches Barnes gulp another anchovy whole, his throat writhing as he swallows. “Are you  _ sure?” _

“Do you think I just went and found a random seal from a beach somewhere?” Steve demands. 

“No! I mean - ” That was pretty much exactly what Sam had been thinking. “Like, I dunno, he jumps in the water, you jump in after, you see a seal, you go, aha! It’s him! And next thing you know - ”

Sam becomes aware that Barnes is writhing more insistently than usual, and he’s started to make loud repetitive wheezing noises. He bobs up and down in the water, his flippers waving. Sam is briefly worried that he’s choking on anchovy or having some kind of seal seizure before he realizes the bastard is  _ laughing.  _

There’s a visually horrible moment where Sam’s eyes slap his brain and tell him he did  _ not  _ just see what he thought he saw if he wants to preserve his sanity, and suddenly there’s a big naked white dude splashing around in the water, honking with laughter. 

Steve, who had started to laugh too, abruptly makes a high-pitched noise and tackles Barnes, making it two dudes flailing around down there. Sam, gaping, finds it in him to feel grateful, because that’s one less white man penis flopping around directly in front of him. The water on this end is  _ not  _ deep enough for this bullshit. 

It doesn’t last long, because Barnes rights himself from Steve’s tackle and sets Steve on his feet again in the water. Compared to his tubby seal self this version of Barnes is pretty thin, his hair lank and matted even when soaking wet. But he has his left arm, the whole damn thing, though it’s mottled pink and red and even purple in places, the skin looking shiny and almost inflamed. Barnes stretches it out with a grunt, flexing the fingers stiffly. His hands are webbed, the nails black and sharp like claws. When he turns his head Sam wonders how the hell Barnes passed as human  _ ever  _ because that face comes nowhere near it. His eyes are huge and seal-black still, his upper lip split and running into his flared and flattened nostrils. 

“How’s the arm?” Steve asks, hanging off his other side, like Barnes doesn’t look like a horrible CGI accident. “Feel okay?”

Barnes gives it another painful-looking flex, then shows Steve a shiny red middle finger. “Great,” Steve says happily. “Sam, I owe you so much dinner.”

“Great. Cool. Isn’t there supposed to be a skin?” Sam says, desperate for anything that’ll cover all the dangly bits currently getting an airing. 

“He’s wearing it,” Steve says. 

Barnes leers at Sam with distinctly unhuman teeth. “Nnnevverrrr ssseenn a dick befffforrrre, ssssweethearrrrt?” 

Well, good to know the personality hasn’t suffered. “It’s not your dick I’m looking at,” Sam retorts. “You go out in public with that face?”

Steve slings his arm around Barnes’ neck and actually kisses that cheek. “Take it off, we’ll go get steak dinner.” 

Barnes licks his teeth at Sam, pointedly, before there’s another ghastly moment of visual - something. Then it’s James Barnes standing there, even thinner, looking perfectly human and slinging a massive mottled pelt over his shoulders like the world’s smelliest fur. 

And he’s  _ still  _ got his dick out. “Pants,” Sam orders, covering his face with both hands. “And then you’re both buying me beer. All the beer. Forever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so apparently typing "mermaid man" into English to Irish translator gives you, no shit, "fear mermaid"

**Author's Note:**

> \- this was banged out in a couple hours bc my friend sent me that seal gifset this morning. The one where the seal flops all over the lady on the beach, you know the one. rustykitchenscissors, this is all your fault
> 
> \- the title is from me typing "barnacle boy" into the English to Irish google translate window
> 
> \- Quietnight's podfic of this, linked just below, has cover art that you do NOT want to miss

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] buachaill sciobail](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499654) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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